The Urbanization Process Of China Along With The Adjustment Of Urban Administrative Division:Type And Performance

Since the reform and opening up,China has embarked on a top-down urbanization development path that is significantly different from Western countries.History has proved that this urbanization road has enabled China to achieve a leap in urbanization in a short period of time.With the large-scale population gathering to the cities,China has achieved industrialization and achieved remarkable economic achievements.The topdown urbanization is based on the development mode of the government's promotion of market cooperation,and the urban system of large,medium and small cities is established in China with a large area and extremely uneven development.This process is accompanied by large-scale institutional changes,changes in production and lifestyle,and continuous upgrading of the industry.Institutional economists represented by North believe that institutions are the key factors determining economic development;spatial economists represented by Krugman believe that economic agglomeration is the root of cities.China's top-down urbanization path is achieved by the combined effect of institutional and economic agglomeration.Administrative division adjustment is an important means to achieve institutional changes and industrial upgrading.Administrative division is the key institutional element of the state.The power boundary of the local government is delimited by it.The adjustment process is accompanied by changes in the organizational structure and power scope of the government.The municipal district is the core of the city.The development process of the city is the process of continuous accumulation and expansion of the economy of the municipal district.Researching China's top-down urbanization process from the perspective of the establishment and expansion of urban administrative boundary adjustment can not only rationalize the process,characteristics and mechanisms of the urbanization road,but also analyze how the basic laws of urban development and how China's unique political and economic systems are integrated.This paper examines the impact of the process of urban district adjustment in different periods on regional economic development and industrialization,based on the theoretical deduction and empirical research of local government competition and economic agglomeration,thus revealing how top-down urbanization promotes the emergence of Chinese cities.This paper also pays attention to the changes in the micromechanism(land transfer)of local governments in the current urban expansion process under the influence of macroscopic means(urban administrative boundary adjustment),thus further revealing the interaction mechanism between the political power centralized system,land transfer and urban economic agglomeration in top-down urbanization.Specifically,the main research contents and conclusions of this paper are as follows:First,this paper divides the adjustment of municipal administrative boundary into the county change-into municipal district in the process of city-manage-county system(the passive change county into district),county change-into municipal district in the process of expanding the municipal district(the active change county into district)and the dice expansion of the districts,from the perspectives of the intensity of local government competition,the degree of promotion of economic agglomeration,the impact on urban spatial form,and the historical process of urban district adjustment.The passive change county into district is in the process of establishing the system of city-manage-county in China.It is a process from the county to the city municipal district,and most of the prefecture-level cities established through the establishment of the city are single-center urban structures.The active change county into district is to divide the counties around the original city into the municipal district,which is an expansion of the city to a certain stage.The dice expansion is the expansion of the towns surrounding the municipal district into the municipal district.The biggest difference between the active change county into district and the dice expansion is that the dice expansion does not reduce the number of counties and has little effect on the overall organizational structure of the prefecture-level government.Second,based on the nighttime lighting data and county-level economic statistics,this paper evaluates the passive change county into district during the set-up city process from 1993 to 2007 in China using difference-in-difference method.The research results find that,first,the establishment of the city-managed-county system has a long-term promotion effect on the economic development and regional economic agglomeration of the newly established municipal district.Second,this reform has promoted the local secondary industry and achieved industrial upgrading in the prefecture-level urban area.The above results are closely related to adjustment of fiscal expenditure structure by the local governments.With the establishment of prefecture-level cities,the local government adjusted the fiscal expenditure structure vigorously,and built the district's perfect infrastructure to attract industries to settle in and complete the initial polarization process of urbanization in China.This process has formed a mutually.reinforcing development of industry and city,which constitutes the unique urbanization logic of China.Third,with the aim of expanding the scope of municipal districts,administrative boundary adjustment is one of the effective approaches to accelerate economic agglomeration and urbanization,but whether this behavior promoted the development of regional economy is yet to be empirically tested.This paper compares the expansion methods of different municipal districts,such as the active change county into district and the dice expansion and proposes that:the mechanisms of the dice expansion is to promote economic agglomeration,the active change county into district is to break the administrative barriers and promote regional economic integration.Based on prefecturelevel economic datasets from 1999 to 2014 and expanding municipal districts boundary adjustment data from 2000 to 2014,we verify the effect of expanding the municipal districts to economic development.The empirical results show that:first,expanding the municipal districts significantly promoted local economic development,but this impact will decrease over time.Second,there are significant differences in the impact of different expansion methods on the economic development.Fourth,more and more cities choose to expand their municipal districts by withdrawing counties.Since the active change county into district has an important impact on the organizational structure of urban governments,and there is also a game process of removing and merging county governments and prefecture-level city governments,the influence mechanism on urban economic development is more complicated.Based on the micro-data of land transfer from 2007 to 2016,this paper further studies the influence of the differences between the merging counties and the non-changing counties in the cities where counties have been removed and districts have been set up.The study found that there is a long process of adjustment in the fourth and fifth year into the accelerated development stage.And the impact of residential land is greater than the impact of mining land.Fifth,In the process of analyzing the historical process of urban district adjustment,it is found that there are serious data missing and inaccurate in the economic statistics of county level in China.This paper selects DMSP/OLS nighttime lighting data as the proxy variable of county-level statistical data.Through detailed analysis of the county-level DMSP-OLS lighting statistics,we believe that with the development of China's economy,the phenomenon of lighting data saturation becomes more and more serious.This paper proposes a new method to correct the lighting data using GDP index to address the saturation phenomenon of the DMSP-OLS NSL data.This method can solve the problem of saturation of nighttime lighting data at the county-level,and improve the reliability of using nighttime nighttime lighting brightness data as an alternative variable for countylevel economic data in China.This paper combed the details of China municipal districts adjustment promote the development of urbanization path since the 1990s.In the early stage of urban development,the passive change county into district makes the economy gradually gather to municipal districts.In addition,the government promotes the development of the secondary industry and realizes the virtuous circle of interaction between industry and city.During the expansion phase of the city,due to regional heterogeneity,different modes of promotion such as the active change county into district and dice expansion have shown a differentiated economy.In recent years,more and more cities have adopted the method of the active change county into district to expand the municipal districts.However,the development of the new districts has gradually deviated from the integration between industry and city,and the tendency to obtain high land sales revenues has become more apparent.Based on the research conclusions of this paper,the following enlightenment is obtained:Firstly,the top-down urbanization development path promotes China's urbanization development in a short period of time.The success of this urban development model is the coordination of China's political economic system and urban development law.Secondly,the key in the initial stage of top-down urbanization is to promote the development of the manufacturing industry in the jurisdiction through various means after the government has determined the development zone of the city,so as to avoid the hollowing out of the city.Third,in the stage of urban expansion,it should fully measure the advantages brought about by the expansion of the municipal district and the disadvantages brought about by the reduction of the incentives of the county-level government after the expansion of the municipal district,and adopt different expansion methods based on the driving ability of the central municipal district.Fourth,after the city adopts withdrawing the county to expand the district,it should promote the integration of the new and the old districts with the industry,and exert the scale effect in the urban economy.